Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Silverlight 5 continues the pace of rapid innovation, building on Silverlight 4's capabilities in the areas of rich applications and premium media experiences. With over 40 new features, the Silverlight 5 beta highlights dramatic video quality and performance improvements, as well as new capabilities that improve developer productivity

Silverlight 5 extends features of the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser for the first time. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks:

Host HTML content as a Web browser control within the Silverlight application. HTML pages, such as help content or e-mail, can be integrated within the application.

Read and write files to the user’s My Documents folder, making it easier to find media files or create local copies of reports.

Additional Silverlight 5 Features Included in this Beta

Hardware video decode for H.264 playback.

Multi‐core background JIT support for improved startup performance.

ComboBox type ahead with text searching.

Full keyboard support in full‐screen for trusted in‐browser applications, enables richer kiosk and

media viewing applications in‐browser.

Default filename in SaveFileDialog – Specify a default filename when you launch the SaveFileDialog.

Unrestricted filesystem access – trusted applications can Read write to files in any directory on

the filesystem.

Improved Graphics stack – The graphics stack has been re‐architected to bring over

improvements from WP7, such as Independent Animations.

Performance optimizations –

XAML Parser performance optimizations.

Network Latency optimizations. Text layout performance improvements.

Hardware acceleration is enabled in windowless mode with Internet Explorer 9.Silverlight 5 Features not included in this Beta

The Beta is a step towards the final release of Silverlight 5. The full feature set planned for Silverlight 5

was announced at the Firestarter event in December 2011 and also includes the following features not

shipped in this Beta:

Support for Postscript vector printing enables users to create reports and documents, including

the ability to create a virtual print view different from what is shown on the screen.

Improved power awareness prevents the screen saver from being shown while watching video and allows the computer to sleep when video is not active.